Why We Took the Car

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  “The doctor will call you.”

  The doctor will call us. It was that easy.

  The speech therapist was somewhat surprised I’d taken care of the health insurance issue. She looked at me with her head cocked to the side.

  “I just gave them my name,” I said.

  She sat with us, waiting for us to be called. We told her she didn’t have to, but I think she felt guilty. For hours, she talked to us about speech therapy, video games, movies, girls, and car thieves. She was really nice. When we told her about trying to write our names in the wheat field with the Lada, she giggled the whole time. And when we told her we were probably going to take the train back home to Berlin when we got out of the hospital, she believed us.

  They kept rushing people with blood streaming down them through the emergency room waiting area. And when it was almost midnight and they still hadn’t called us, the woman finally said good-bye. She must have asked us a thousand times if there was anything else she could do for us. She gave us her address in case we needed it to get reimbursed for the medical bills, and gave us two hundred Euros to pay for the train tickets. I was a little embarrassed, but I wasn’t sure how to turn it down. And then she said something weird when she was leaving. She looked at us, after having done everything anyone in her position could possibly do, and said, “You two look like potatoes.” Then she walked away. She pushed her way through the revolving door and was gone. I found it unbelievably funny. To this day, I still laugh every time I think of it: You two look like potatoes. I don’t know if anyone will understand it, but she really was the nicest of all.

  Tschick finally got to see the doctor. A minute later he came back out. We had to go upstairs for an X-ray. I was getting more and more tired. At some point I dozed off on a bench in the hall, and when I woke up, Tschick was standing in front of me on crutches. His foot was in a cast. A real plaster cast, not some plastic splint.

  A nurse put a few painkillers in his hand and told us we had to wait because the doctor needed to look at his foot again. I wondered who had put the cast on if it wasn’t the doctor. The janitor? The nurse took us to an empty room where we could wait. There were two freshly made beds in the room.

  The mood was no longer a happy one. Our trip was over. Even if nobody except us knew about it. We were pretty miserable. I had no desire to go anywhere on the train. Tschick’s pills took a while to work. He lay in bed moaning. I went to the window and peered out. It was still dark out, but when I pressed my nose against the glass and put a hand on each side of my face, I could make out the coming dawn. I saw a hint of light and . . .

  I told Tschick to turn off the light. He used one of his crutches as a remote control. The landscape became much more visible. I saw one lonely phone booth along the hospital driveway. I saw a sole concrete block. I saw a desolate fence, and a field. Some open land. Something about this area seemed familiar. As it got lighter, I could make out three vehicles on the other side of the strip. Two cars and a giant tow truck with a crane on it.

  “You are not going to believe what I’m looking at.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What is it?”

  “Have a look.”

  “I’m not looking at shit,” said Tschick. And then, after a pause, “What is it?”

  “Seriously, you really have to see it for yourself.”

  He groaned. I heard him fiddle with the crutches. Then he pressed his face to the glass next to mine.

  “It can’t be,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  We stared out over the plowed field we had seen a few hours before from the other side. There’d been a white box on the horizon then. We were in that white box now. The speech therapist had driven in a big loop.

  The sun had yet to break over the horizon, but you could already see the black Lada in the rest area next to the autobahn. It was upright now, resting on its wheels. They must have turned it back over. The trunk was open and three men were walking around the car, standing next to it, walking around it some more. One was in uniform, two in the overalls typical of sanitation workers. At least that’s what it looked like from a distance. The crane on the tow truck was being maneuvered over the Lada, and somebody was putting chains around the wheels. The uniformed man closed the trunk, opened it again, then shut it again. Then he went over to the cab of the tow truck. Then two people went back over to the Lada. Then one went over to the truck again.

  “What are they doing?” asked Tschick.

  “Can’t you see?”

  “No, I mean, what are they doing?”

  He was right. They were just walking back and forth doing this or that, doing the same things over and over again, but really doing nothing. Maybe they were looking for clues or something. We watched for a while longer, then Tschick lay back down in bed, moaning, and said, “Wake me up if anything happens.”

  But nothing happened. One of the men tested the chains, one went back over to the tow truck, one smoked.

  Suddenly the view disappeared because the light went on in our room. The doctor was standing in the doorway, breathing loudly. In one of his nostrils was a blood-soaked cotton ball hanging down to his upper lip. He slowly shuffled over to Tschick’s bed.

  “Lift up your leg,” he said. He had a voice like a war-movie general.

  Tschick hoisted the cast. With one hand the doctor jiggled the cast, while with the other he held the wadding in his nose. He grabbed an X-ray out of a folder and held it up to the light. Then he threw it onto the bed next to Tschick and shuffled back out. He turned around in the doorway and said, “Contusion, hairline fracture, fourteen days.” Then he rolled his eyes. Then, like he was steadying himself, he leaned against the door frame. He took a deep breath and said, “It’s no big deal. Fourteen days off your foot. Consult your own doctor once you’re home.” He looked at Tschick, gauging whether he’d understood him, and Tschick nodded.

  The doctor closed the door behind him as he left. But two seconds later he threw it open again, now seemingly wide awake. “A joke!” he said, smiling first at Tschick, then at me. “What’s the difference between a doctor and an architect?”

  We didn’t know. So he gave the answer. “A doctor buries his mistakes.”

  “Huh?” said Tschick.

  The doctor swatted the air with his hand. “If you get tired, there’s coffee in the nurse’s station. You can help yourselves. Good ol’ caffeine.”

  He closed the door again. I had no time to wonder why the doctor was so weird because I went straight to the window. Tschick shut off the light with one of his crutches, and I just caught sight of the police driving off on the autobahn. The tow truck was already gone. The Lada was all by itself in the parking lot of the rest area. Tschick didn’t believe me.

  “Did the tow truck break down or something?”

  “No clue.”

  “Well, it’s now or never.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?” He hit a crutch against the window.

  “There’s no way it’ll still drive,” I said.

  “Why not? And if it won’t, who cares. We at least need to get our stuff out of it. Even if it can’t be driven . . .”

  “There’s no way you can still drive it.”

  “Still drive what?” asked a nurse, switching on the light. She had Tschick’s — or rather André’s — file in one hand and two cups of coffee on a tray in the other.

  “Your name is André Langin,” I whispered while rubbing my eyes like I was blinded by the light. Tschick said something about how we needed to get home. And unfortunately, that was exactly the reason the nurse wanted to talk to us.

  CHAPTER 40

  Berlin was pretty far away, she said — where were we headed now? I told her we were staying in the area
with an aunt and that it was all no problem. I shouldn’t have said that. The nurse didn’t ask where the aunt lived, but she took me to the nurse’s station and put a phone in my hand. Tschick suppressed his pain, staggered out on his crutches, and said that we could go by foot. The nurse said, “Go ahead and try her first. Or don’t you know the number?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. I saw a phone book on the table and didn’t want that shoved into my hands next. So I dialed a random number hoping nobody would answer. Four in the morning.

  I heard it ring. The nurse probably heard it too, since she was standing right there next to us. The smart thing would have been to call my own house, because it was a sure bet that nobody would answer there. But to do that I would have had to dial the Berlin area code first, and the nurse already looked suspicious enough as it was. It rang once, twice, three times, four. I was getting ready to hang up and say our aunt must still be asleep and that we could just walk . . .

  “Errm, uh, Reiber residence,” said a man’s voice.

  “Oh, hi, Aunt Mona!”

  “This is the Reiber residence,” said the man sleepily. “No aunt. No Mona.”

  “Did I wake you?” I asked. “Of course, stupid question. Here’s the deal.” I gestured to the nurse that everything was taken care of so she could get back to work if she needed to.

  Apparently there was no work to be done, because she stayed as still as a statue.

  “You must have the wrong number,” I heard the voice say. “This is Mr. Reiber.”

  “Yeah, I know. I hope you didn’t . . . yeah, oh yes,” I said, signaling to Tschick and the nurse how surprised and worried Aunt Mona was to get a call from us at this hour.

  The silence on the line now was almost as annoying as the throat-clearing and coughing had been.

  “Yeah, no, well, something happened,” I continued. “André had a little accident. Something fell on his foot. No, no. We’re at the hospital. They put a cast on him.”

  I looked at the nurse. She still didn’t budge.

  There were some unintelligible noises from the other end of the line, and then the voice was there again. He didn’t sound so sleepy anymore. “I get it,” said the man. “We’re having a pretend conversation.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s no big deal. It’s not too serious — just a hairline fracture or whatever.”

  “And I am Aunt Mona.”

  “No — I mean, yes, yes, exactly.”

  “There’s somebody next to you, listening.” The man made a noise of some sort. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he might be quietly laughing.

  “Yep, yeah . . .”

  “And if I shout really loud right now, you’d have a major problem on your hands, right?”

  “Please, no, uh . . . no. You really don’t need to worry. Everything’s all taken care of.”

  “It’s not taken care of,” said the nurse. “She needs to pick you up.”

  “Do you need help?” asked the man.

  “What?”

  The nurse looked as if she was going to grab the phone from me any second to speak to Aunt Mona herself.

  “You have to pick us up, Aunt Mona. Can you? Yes?”

  “I don’t really understand what this is about,” said the man on the phone, “but it sounds like you’re in real trouble. Is someone threatening you?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, a broken ankle, making a fake call at four in the morning, and you sound like you can’t be a day over thirteen. You must be in trouble.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And obviously you can’t say what it is. So one more time: Do you need help?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? This is the last time I’m going to offer.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I’ll just listen, then,” said the man.

  “In any event, if you could maybe pick us up in the car,” I said, sounding embarrassed.

  “Not if you don’t want me to,” the man said, chuckling. And that threw me off. If he had hung up or yelled at me, I would have understood that at four in the morning. But the fact that he was amused and offered to help us, that was crazy. Ever since I was a little boy my father had told me that the world was a bad place. The world is bad and people are bad. Don’t trust anyone, don’t talk to strangers, all of that. My parents drilled that into me, my teachers drilled that into me, even TV drilled that into me. When you watched the local news — people were bad. When you saw primetime investigative shows — people were bad. And maybe it was true, maybe ninety-nine percent of people were bad. But the strange thing was that on this trip, Tschick and I had run into almost only people from the one percent who weren’t bad. And now here I was, getting a random stranger out of bed at four A.M., for no good reason, and he was super nice and even willing to help us. Maybe they should tell you about things like that in school too, just so you’re not totally surprised by it. I was so surprised that all I could do was kind of stutter.

  “Yeah, twenty minutes, great, yeah. You’ll pick us up. Good.” For the grand finale of my performance, I turned to the nurse and asked, “What’s the name of this hospital again?”

  “Wrong question!” hissed the man immediately.

  The nurse furrowed her brow. My God, was I an idiot.

  “Virchow Hospital,” she said slowly. “It’s the only one within fifty kilometers.”

  “Exactly,” said the man.

  “Ah, she just said the same thing,” I said, pointing to the phone.

  “So you’re also not from around here,” said the man. “You must have really gotten yourselves into some shit. I hope I can read about it in the paper tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “Definitely. We’ll be waiting.”

  “Okay, good luck,” said the man.

  “Thanks!”

  The man laughed again and hung up.

  “Was she laughing?” said the nurse.

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve made her worry,” said Tschick, who had only gotten half of the conversation. “She’s been through this before.”

  “And she thinks it’s funny?”

  “She’s cool,” said Tschick, emphasizing the word “cool” in a way that said not everyone in the room was cool.

  We stood by the phone for a few minutes; then the nurse said, “You’re a couple of rascals.”

  Then she let us leave.

  CHAPTER 41

  We sat down in front of the hospital entrance and acted as if we were keeping an eye out for Aunt Mona. Once we were sure nobody was watching us anymore, we took off. I ran and Tschick hobbled. There was a fence at the edge of the field. Tschick threw his crutches over and then threw himself over. A few yards into the field he got stuck. The field was freshly plowed and the crutches sank into the dirt like a hot knife in butter. It wasn’t going to work. He started swearing, left the crutches sticking up, and hopped along with one arm around my shoulders. When we had made it across about a third of the field, we turned around. The landscape was blue. Light from the sun, which was still hidden behind the hospital building, shone through the mist and the tops of trees. The crutches, still sticking up, though one had drooped to the side, looked like a cross. In one of the windows of the upper story of the hospital building — maybe even the same window we’d looked out and seen the Lada — there was a shape in white scrubs looking out at us. Probably the nurse thinking about what a couple of nut-jobs she’d just taken care of. If she had realized how crazy we really were, she probably wouldn’t have been standing there, just watching.

  But she must have seen where we were heading, and she probably also saw us arrive at the car. The roof and the passenger side were dinged up, but not so badly that you couldn’t sit comfortably inside. The passenger door couldn’t be opened, but y
ou could slide across from the driver’s side. The interior looked like a dump. The accident, being flipped over, and then being flipped back up, had sent everything flying all over the place — all our supplies, jam jars, gas canister, empty bottles, sleeping bags. The Richard Clayderman cassette was stuck between the seats. The hood of the car was slightly buckled, and the part of the roof where the car had been lying upside down was smeared with sand-covered oil. “That’s it,” I said.

  Tschick squeezed himself into the driver’s seat but couldn’t get his plaster-covered foot onto the gas pedal — the cast was too wide. He put the car in neutral, squirmed in the seat a little, and tapped the gas with his left foot. The engine fired right up. Tschick shifted into the passenger seat. I said, “You must have lost your mind.”

  “All you have to do is push the gas and steer,” he said. “I’ll shift.”

  I sat down at the wheel and told Tschick it wasn’t going to work. There was half a tank of gas, and the motor was idling smoothly, but when I looked at the autobahn and saw the cars going by at two hundred kilometers an hour, I knew it wasn’t going to work.

  “I have to tell you a secret,” I said. “I’m the biggest coward in the world. The most boring person on the planet and the biggest coward. We’ll have to walk. Maybe I could give it a try on a dirt track or something. But not on the autobahn.”

  “Why would you possibly say you were boring?” asked Tschick. So I asked him if he realized why I had even agreed to go with him to Wallachia in the first place. Namely, because I was boring — so boring, in fact, that I didn’t get invited to a party that everyone else got invited to. So I had decided for once in my life not to be boring. Tschick said I was nuts and that he hadn’t been bored for a single second since he had gotten to know me. That on the contrary this had been the coolest and most exciting week of his entire life. Then we talked about the coolest and most exciting week of our lives — and it was hard to accept that it was now over.